See also Health
13. Death; Disease; Mourning;
War
I should be sorry to think that what engrosses the attention of
my friend, should have no part of mine. Your mind is now full of
the fate of Dury; but his fate is past, and nothing remains but
to try what reflection will suggest to mitigate the terrours of a
violent death, which is more formidable at first glance, than on
a nearer and more steady view. A violent death is never very
painful; the only danger is, lest it should be unprovided. But
if a man can be supposed to make no provision for death in war,
what can be the state which would have awakened him to the care
of futurity? When would that man have prepared himself to die,
who went to seek death without preparation? What then can be the
reason why we lament more him that dies of a wound, than him that
dies of a fever? A man that languishes with disease, ends his
life with more pain, but with less virtue: he leaves no example
to his friends, nor bequeaths any honour to his descendants. The
only reason why we lament a Soldier's death, is, that we think he
might have lived longer; yet this cause of grief is common to
many other kinds of death, which are not so passionately
bewailed. The truth is, that every death is violent which is the
effect of accident; every death which is not gradually brought
on by the miseries of age, or when life is extinguished for any
other reason than that it is burnt out. He that dies before
sixty, of a cold or consumption, dies, in reality, by a violent
death; yet his death is borne with patience, only because the
cause of his untimely end is silent and invisible. Let us
endeavor to see things as they are, and then enquire whether we
ought to complain. Whether to see life as it is, will give us
much consolation, I know not; but the consolation which is drawn
from truth if any there be, is solid and durable: that which may
be derived from errour, must be, like its original, fallacious
and fugitive.
Johnson: Letter to Bennet Langton
Link
168. Disease; Whining
Though Mr. Johnson was commonly affected even to agony at the
thoughts of a friend's dying, he troubled himself very little
with the complaints they might make to him of ill health. "Dear
Doctor (said he one day to a common acquaintance, who lamented
the tender state of his inside), do not be like the
spider, man; and spin conversation thus incessantly out thy own
bowels."
Piozzi: Anecdotes
Link
169. Disease
I told him of another friend who suffered grievously with the
gout -- "He will live a vast many years for all that (replied
he), and then what signifies how much he suffers? but he will
die at last, poor fellow, there's the misery; gout seldom takes
the fort by a coup-de-main, but turning the siege into a
blockade, obliges it to surrender at discretion."
Piozzi: Anecdotes
Link
314. Disease
"But what can a sick man say, but that he is sick? His thoughts
are necessarily concentered in himself; he neither receives nor
can give delight; his inquiries are after alleviations of pain,
and his efforts are to catch some momentary comfort. Though I am
now in the neighbourhood of the Peak, you must expect no account
of its wonders, of its hills, its waters, its caverns, or its
mines."
Johnson: Letter to William Windham
Link
631. Disease; Health
"He that for a short gratification brings weakness and diseases
upon himself, and for the pleasure of a few years passed in the
tumults of diversion and clamours of merriment, condemns the
maturer and more experienced part of his life to the chamber and
the couch, may be justly reproached, not only as a spendthrift of
his own happiness, but as a robber of the public; as a wretch
that has voluntarily disqualified himself for the business of his
station, and refused that part which Providence assigns him in
the general task of human nature."
Johnson: Rambler #48 (September 1, 1750)
Link
632. Disease
"There are perhaps very few conditions more to be pitied than
that of an active and elevated mind, labouring under the weight
of a distempered body."
Johnson: Rambler #48 (September 1, 1750)
Link
633. Disease
"Disease generally begins that equality which death completes;
the distinctions which set one man so much above another are very
little perceived in the gloom of a sick chamber, where it will be
vain to expect entertainment from the gay, or instruction from
the wise; where all human glory is obliterated, the wit is
clouded, the reasoner perplexed, and the hero subdued; where the
highest and brightest of mortal beings finds nothing left him but
the consciousness of innocence."
Johnson: Rambler #48 (September 1, 1750)
Link
657. Disease; Mortality
"He that ... wishes to see life stripped of those ornaments which
make it glitter on stage, and exposed in its natural meanness,
impotence, and nakedness, may find all the delusion laid open in
the chamber of disease: he will there find vanity divested of
her robes, power deprived of her sceptre, and hypocrisy without
her mask."
Johnson: Rambler #54 (September 22, 1750)
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